Do you ever feel like you’re asking God for a favor? There’s little power in that kind of prayer. But I’m impressed by the words of the psalmist, repeated three times in our Sunday liturgy:
“Arise, O God, plead thine own cause!” (Ps 74:22)
The psalmist was suffering attacks as a representative of God’s own people. So he recognizes that if God helps him, then God helps his own cause as well. This gives righteous confidence to his prayer.
You can pray with similar confidence if you dedicate your life to God without reservation. You’ve dedicated your work to him, your finances to him, your family to him. By defending you, God defends his own cause.
God is glorified when he rescues those who depend on him. We see this over and over in Scripture and through countless testimonies today.
But if you have a way of compartmentalizing God things over there and your own things over here, then confidence in prayer doesn’t come quite as easily, does it?
It’s an easy fix. Offer all to Christ who gave all for you, and then begin your prayer; you’ll find that your cause aligns increasingly with his, and you will be able to say, “It’s your work, O God, not mine! Bring it to completion!” You can be confident that God will defend his own cause.
In Christ,
Fr. Scharbach